What's Bringing Me Joy: Jon Batiste's Beethoven Blues

Jon Batiste has been on my radar since the first episode of Stephen Colbert's tenure at The Late Show, where Batiste led the house band as musical director. His brilliance was (and still is) undeniable.

Like any gifted musician, there are flourishes of genius that can feel thrown off and had you not been there to see it, you wouldn't even know you'd missed out on it. That's the joy and ephemeral nature of live music and improvisation.

A small obsession with this concept started with this incredible clip from an interview with Chris Wallace.

Too often, that's it. Even though it wasn't live music for me, watching at home on CNN or here on YouTube, there was nothing to suggest that this was something Batiste hadn't dreamed up on the spot, a riff that simply came to him as he was proving a point.

There are other examples of this for me. For example, the way Stevie Wonder sings "It's Your Thing" by The Isley Brothers at the beginning of Questlove's documentary Summer of Soul. (It's about 3:30 minutes into the film, if you're interested.) Something about it—the groove of it, the tone of his voice, all of it—got to me on a deep level, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I wanted to find it, but there was no longer recording to be had.

Another is from the documentary The Greatest Night in Pop, about the recording of "We Are The World." The film's various talking heads are remembering the night, and they talk about the moments in between takes, where Ray Charles would sit at the piano and bang out these remixed gospel-y versions of "We Are The World." I was captivated by this and couldn't help but wishing there was such a version, but of course, there isn't. It was nothing more than a genius noodling around. (This moment happens at about minute 56 in the film, right before an endearing anecdote about how Charles needed to go to the restroom and, of all people, Stevie Wonder said he'd show him the way. I'd clearly found this moment so rewatchable (for both the gospel rendition and the story) that when I pulled up the film in Netflix to check the time stamp, the film was already at the precise moment in the film from the last time I'd gone looking for it.)

After seeing Batiste play that mash-up of Beethoven and blues/gospel above, I was already resigned to it being another in the list of "I wish that were an official Thing and not just something I heard once."

But sometimes the universe just delivers.

Imagine my joy when, about two weeks ago, Batiste released Beethoven Blues, an 11-song album of remixed classics (with a promising "Vol. 1" on the cover that makes me hope there's more where that came from).